You are still requesting and receiving the ads as they are part of the results page. View source in your browser to verify. Your ad blocker is probably modifying the page after you receive it so the ads do not display. I can do the same thing without an ad blocker using something like curl and sed. I edit out the ads, then view the page. The parent commenter OTOH is referring to DNS-based "blocking". In that case, the ads come from another domain and because we control DNS the ads are never requested, never sent and thus never received. There is nothing to discard. The word "block" is really not the best term to describe what is happening.

That's OP's point. Anyway DNS-based ad blocker can't block such ads (delivered from same host name as content) but browser extension can. I'm curious why DNS-based approach is such popular even for PC browser.